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After working at big banks including Citigroup and UBS, followed by a stint as information security for consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble, Kostas Georgakopoulos got an offer he couldn't refuse from snack maker Mondelez International to run both its IT and cybersecurity operations.
“That was a pretty unique challenge,” says Georgakopoulos, who started at the company in 2021 as CISO and chief technology officer. “Part of the reason I came to Mondelez was the opportunity to do two different roles that have a lot of parallel tracks, but have their own uniqueness in terms of responsibilities.”
One early change he made was to add more cybersecurity expertise to Mondelez, which generated $36 billion in annual revenue for the latest fiscal year 2023 and ranks No. 115 on the Fortune 500. The company now has over 50 full-time cyber specialists, up from about 10 when Georgakopoulos joined, and this team manages all cyber platforms rather than hiring a third party to do that work on its behalf.
As CTO, Georgakopoulos has hired dozens of engineers globally who are proficient with cloud platforms including Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google. While it has embraced a multi-cloud approach, the company last month designated AWS as its strategic cloud provider and has already migrated hundreds of workloads there—including hundreds of terabytes of data from finance, marketing and sales, and communications. "Our focus has been to exploit the automation that AWS has," says Georgakopoulos.
For example, when moving a workload to the cloud, his team can add a ticket to ServiceNow that asks AWS to autonomously move a user’s identity, login, access to software, as well as micro-segmentation, a security method to manage employee access to data, applications, and other workloads. It can take less than 20 minutes to set this system up to create these user controls and privileges, and Mondelez says it can add hundreds or even thousands of servers that give workers access to applications or files.
Georgakopoulos says the bigger bet on AWS means lowering costs versus what competitors offered and creating a less complex environment to store data across the company. Working with AWS lets Mondelez “significantly” reduce the number of Microsoft servers it uses, thereby cutting software licensing costs and minimizing operational issues that have become more prevalent and have stung Mondelez and others.
The main one was last year’s global IT outage that impacted millions of Microsoft devices and servers connected to cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike. Mondelez's systems suffered more than five hours of downtime due to the CrowdStrike outage.